. . . but I don’t consider myself gay, not because I think, that “ugh!” you know, it’s because I see me and I see a gay male right here, and then I see [a] heterosexual male on the other side, you know what I mean, and I’m like, in the middle . . .

ORAL INTERVIEW WITH TRANSGENDER COCA SAPIEN (2001)

How do queers in the US-México cities of El Paso and Juárez “recognize themselves as subjects of a sexuality,” and what “fields of knowledge” and types of normativity have led Chicana/o lesbians, gay men, and transgender folks to experience a particular subjectivity?1 I want to consider this specific, historical, political border to argue that for these border queers of color, the particular fields of knowledge that make up their sexuality constitute an epistemology of coloniality. More importantly, queers in El Paso and Juárez must engage and perform decolonial practices to survive the colonial landscape.

When I began my study of queer Chicanas/os and Mexicanas/os in a region that was my home for fourteen years, I realized that questions outnumbered answers and that the twenty-four transcripts of oral interviews in my possession would only provide cursory insights into the lives of a few lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender folks in these geographic borderlands.2 My friend and former colleague at the University of Texas in El Paso, Gregory Ramos, conducted the oral interviews from 2000 to 2002 and subsequently wrote a poignant performance piece, “Border Voices,” inspired by the LGBTQ folks he interviewed. Of the twenty-five interviewees, seven were women, seventeen were men, and one was a transgender woman. Six of the seven women identified as Chicana, fronteriza, or Hispanic. One was white. Of the men, twelve identified as Chicano, Hispanic, or Mexicano; one was African American, one was Latino with parents from El Salvador, and three were white men.3 Overall, the majority of interviewees identified as Chicana/o, Mexican, or Hispanic. Those interviewed probably represent a cross-section of the predominantly Chicana/o and Mexican communities of El Paso, where seventy-eight percent of the population is of Mexican origin. Although some of the Chicano/a interviewees may have been born in Juárez or have family in Juárez, only one of the twenty-five said he was a Mexicano from Juárez. Although he lived in El Paso, his dual citizenship allowed his allegiance to México.4

186 Fishing Lore in Texas water’s surface to check the holes in the sides and bottom of the creek where fish stayed. The murky water in the creek made it difficult to see very far. They had seen several nice fish in the water, when all of a sudden Buster disturbed a water moccasin. It bit him on his leg just a few inches above his ankle. He shot to the top of the water and yelled, “Snake bite.” Dad had seen the action under the water and came up right behind Buster. Hurriedly they got on the bank.

Dad had Buster lie down with his head higher than his feet so that his blood would flow slower to his heart. Dad grabbed his sharpened pocket-knife, cut two deep X’s over the fang marks, and began sucking out the blood and poison, then spitting it on the ground. The women and children were horrified. We cried, prayed, wrung our hands, and paced back and forth while this was taking place.

All the while, Grandpa Coney was begging Dad not to do it.

“Lowell, if you’ve got an open cut in your mouth, that poison will go right to your brain and kill you. Let’s take Buster to the doctor.” Dad didn’t even pause to answer; he just continued sucking out that poison and spitting it out. He knew that the snake was very large with a lot of venom. He also knew it would take at least half an hour to get to the nearest hospital. By that time, Buster could be dead. Dad continued the treatment for about fifteen minutes until he was satisfied that he had removed all of the poison that he could. Then Buster’s leg was bandaged. Everyone began loading the cars with whatever they had brought, and we all returned home, emotionally exhausted. We caught no fish that day! But the main thing was that Buster was alive, thanks to an oldtime folk remedy.

Verdell Jones III will remember the spring and summer of 2011 as the off season when Jordan Hulls snapped. Before that, Hulls was the quiet, scrappy little hometown fan favorite who kept his mouth shut, passed the ball and made 3-pointers and free throws. The Bloomington South graduate spent every free moment in Assembly Hall or Cook Hall, and hoped his Indiana teammates would take notice and follow.

But he didn’t demand it.

This summer, though, after suffering through 41 losses in his first two seasons as a college basketball player, Hulls reached two critical junctures in his mind. He found the confidence to lead and decided he could no longer stand defeat.

Teammates relay stories of this new Hulls barking orders, hollering at teammates and even kicking them out of strength and conditioning sessions or open gyms for sloppy performance. It’s not easy to picture the baby-faced 6-footer screaming at his much bigger and older-looking colleagues, but there isn’t a witness who denies the stories.

The brilliant campaigning and historic outcome of the 2008 United States presidential election resonated on local and global levels, shattering—in the views of many—the glass ceilings hovering just above the heads of people of color in the United States. Yet amidst the echoes of celebration, a multitude of voters watched in disbelief as the passing of California Proposition 8 stripped away the rights of same-sex couples to legally marry—a right recognized by the state Supreme Court in May 2008. For nearly six months, queer couples across the state had enjoyed equal access to the rite and rights of marriage before this proposition reversed the historic court ruling.1 Los Angeles–based Chicana writer and performer Monica Palacios staged her dissenting voice in the form of protest performance. Palacios’s treatment of same-sex marriage and Proposition 8 first appeared in an updated version of her one-woman show Greetings from a Queer Señorita that ran for four weeks in Santa Ana, CA, in summer 2008.2 In October 2008 at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, CA, Palacios merged the new pieces on same-sex marriage from Greetings to create Amor y Revolución, a silly, sex-laced, and politically charged romp through this defining political milieu for queer Californians.3 From political propaganda to popular reception, Palacios’s performances confront the issue of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer4 rights through the reinscribed metaphor of revolution—a war and a fight for the right to love. Transcending the language of violence and combat, Palacios’s works seize a productive theatrical space of revolutionary love in the face of hateful media representation, legislation, and political campaigning. Invoking Augusto Boal and Gloria Anzaldúa’s living discourse on theater and theory, I will discuss how Palacios’s performances fashion an interstitial space of queer reinscription, coalition, and inspiration for queer and Latina/o communities.

Chuck Taylor, then in his sixty-eighth year, received many telegrams, congratulatory letters, and goodwill calls when he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1969. The letters and cards and telegrams were piled high on a circular table in the breakfast nook inside his Port Charlotte, Florida home. He could puff on the sweet-smelling tobacco in his briar pipe—he smoked that pipe all the time in his later years—or he might dip a small spoon into his favorite lemon ice cream and savor the fruits of his labors that had made his name famous all over the land.

One letter stood out. Chuck must have leaned forward on his elbows when he saw the postmark—it was from Terre Haute, Indiana—and a satisfied smile likely swept over his face as he unfolded the letter and read its contents. All the other correspondence from coaches and fans and businessmen were predictable, even “canned” accolades, but this piece of mail that he held firmly between his fingers was different. This was a tunnel back to his early career, a reminder to Chuck that he was so much more than a salesman or even an icon or just another retiree set out to pasture on a Florida golf course.

Closely related to horses and ponies are, of course, flies. They come with the territory. On a nice warm day a deposit of fresh horse turds will have a thousand flies on it before it hits the ground. I think the flies watch the horse and know when he’s ready to let go, then mill around the exit and grab hold on the way down, fighting for the best spots. Some experts say the fly larvae live in the horse’s bowels and spring to life when the manure lands in the dirt. I doubt that the fly larvae cause much distress to the horse from inside, but once outside, the battle begins, and the horseshoer is right in the middle.

I certainly don’t pretend to know anything technical or scientific about flies, but from my position at ground level, I can describe several kinds and I will tell some stories about each and the battle waged against them by horse and shoer.

The most prominent buzzing nemesis looks like a regular housefly, and for all I know, it is. These flies don’t give up easily. They generally swarm around the feet and ankles of the horse and sometimes get so engrossed (an appropriate word) in the often bloody feast that you can squash them right on the horse. If you wave them off, they rise about an inch and jump right back on. These flies won’t bother a leg that is being held by the shoer, but that leaves three other legs for them to assault. And that’s where the trouble starts. There is no way an average horse is going to stand quietly with one foot in the shoer’s lap and three feet on the ground being eaten by flies. You can yell and shout and insult the horse for wriggling around, but the horse is simply not going to stand still under this kind of fly attack. All of this limits the options for the shoer. Assuming there is no fly spray (more about that later), the shoer will probably try to get as much work done as possible on a foot before the horse reaches the limits of its tolerance and breaks loose, scattering horseshoer and tools.

Just after launching off on my third morning, I discovered that I had stopped too soon the previous evening, for just around the bend was a perfect camping site. There were two open-water lakes in a broad, short-grass pasture with a ridge between the lakes and the river. The ridge was populated with young pine trees which provided a cozy shelter. Apparently, grazing cattle kept the area as clean of weeds and brush as a mowed lawn. Several shore birds were wading the shallow edges of the lakes. They were common egrets, little green herons, and what appeared to be willets. I took my binoculars and walked over the berm, around the lakes and behind a grove of vegetation in the center of the large opening. Behind the vegetation was a beautiful oxbow lake, a remnant of what had once been a large bend in the river. Judging from the tracks, many animals come from out of the woods to graze on the grass, so it is a good site for animal watching as well as birdwatching.

In 2008, Southern California witnessed its first major “post-ethnic” art exhibition in Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement.1 Building on the performances and visual arts of Asco, the Los Angeles–based collective originally composed of Harry Gamboa, Jr., Gronk, Willie Herrón, and Patssi Valdez, the exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) intended to challenge conventional parameters of Chicana/o art and offer one strategy for interpreting conceptual art produced by artists who came of age after the Chicano Movement. Co-curators Rita Gonzalez, Howard Fox, and Chon Noriega posit that the temporal curatorial model of art produced after something allowed them “the freedom to follow an idea, rather than represent a constituency.”2 Interestingly, the show was simultaneously a complete success and a dramatic failure. Ticket sales evidence that it was overwhelmingly popular, breaking LACMA attendance records. Yet local artists and critics found the exhibition lacking. They hosted several public discussions, generated hundreds of blog posts, and published articles in regional and national media to address the show’s historical, aesthetic, and positional errors. Some critics responded by producing their own exhibitions performed as errata that offered a corrective vision of Chicana/o art in Los Angeles.3

The autobiography of Gideon Lincecum, my great-great-great grandfather, contains some remarkable accounts of hunting and fishing in unspoiled areas of Texas in 1835. Lincecum’s six-month exploration of Texas came about after a good many citizens of

Columbus, Mississippi, where he resided and practiced medicine, became interested in migrating to Texas. An emigrating company was organized late in 1834, and Lincecum was appointed physician to an exploring committee charged with traveling to Texas and bringing back a report. He and five other men left Columbus on

January 9, 1835, and crossed the Sabine River into Texas on February 3.1 The following excerpts from Lincecum’s autobiography are among many that describe encounters with wildlife in Texas. In

1848, Lincecum moved his family to Long Point, Washington

County. His memoirs were written when he was an old man, and most of his accounts of hunting and fishing were first published in

One of my fondest memories of my Coney family is the fishing trips. Fishing was one of the activities the Coney boys loved. The

“boys” were the four sons of Leon Josephus Coney and Ida

Augusta Hawkins Coney. Their farm was located about five miles southeast of Ladonia, Texas. Not only was fishing their favorite sport, but it also provided some good meals. Their fishing was not done with a rod and reel. They used seines, and “grabbled” for the fish. My dad, Lowell (Sheep), and his brother Roy Leon (Buster) were the only two of the boys who could swim. Being the two youngest boys, they had developed a close bond through the years.

Dad could hold his breath under water so very long that they sometimes wondered if he had drowned. Buster could dive deeper than Dad. between the two of them, they checked out each fishing hole for suitable fish—as well as for water moccasins that were living in those holes—and selected the holes they would fish. They had several places that they visited regularly.

On April 21, 1941, terrible news passed through the crowd of three thousand at the annual state field trial of the Texas Fox and

Wolf Hunters Association near Crockett. The nocturnal hunters of fox and coyote—“hilltoppers,” “moonlighters,” or just “plain old forks-of-the-creek fox hunters”—had assembled for one of their rare daytime competitions to discover who had the best dog.

Judges watched hounds with big numbers on their sides run foxes in broad daylight to see which ones led the packs. Day or night, such men never rode to hounds like the red-coated horsemen.

Instead, in most of their hunting, they stood by fires and listened in the dark to the voices of a special breed of dog developed to chase foxes entirely on its own. It was a strange hound and a strange bloodless sort of hunting, in which, as folklorist F. E. Abernethy once observed, “The race is the thing, and it is the running of it that is its significance, not the reward at the end. . . .”1 In truth, as outsiders often observed, there seemed no obvious reward to fox hunting. The game was left alive to run another night, and in any case, nobody ate foxes.